
Cooking school creates bilingual textbooks about making Taiwanese delicacies
Want to learn how to cook Taiwanese cuisine? An award-winning cooking school in Taipei teaches people how to make local delicacies from scratch in both Mandarin Chinese and English. In the latest, the school has now created a YouTube channel, a bilingual textbook, and free online PDFs for teachers and students. FTV reporter Stephany Yang whets our taste buds as she talks to the school’s founder, Chelsea Tsai.
The cooking school offers classes on how to make classic Taiwanese dishes like braised pork rice, gua bao, beef noodle soup, pearl milk tea and xiaolongbao from scratch. Founded in 2018, the school has welcomed students from over 46 countries and has won accolades like the TripAdvisor Traveler’s Choice Award. Chelsea Tsai, the founder of the school, hopes to educate people about how delicious Taiwanese food is, along with the stories behind each dish
Chelsea Tsai
Cooking school founder
Luroufan is a very classic Taiwanese street food. It has three basic elements of Taiwan cooking. First of all, we have pork. We have rice and we have soy sauce. They are the three key elements of Taiwanese cuisine, which is why it is so representative of Taiwan. The pork belly has the perfect balance between fat and meat. Once we braise it for at least 30 minutes, you can have a very nice texture and also a very nice flavor. We cook it with soy sauce.
The cooking school has unveiled new projects, including a bilingual textbook for teachers, cooking classes for bilingual teachers, a free online PDF and a YouTube channel with videos teaching people how to make Taiwanese delicacies.
Hsu Chia-chen
Chongqing Junior High School teacher
It introduces the special thing about Taiwan. I think it is very helpful for my students because originally in my class I just taught them the ingredients and how to do it but I didn’t tell them more about Taiwan. This textbook will help my class in the future.
Chelsea Tsai
Cooking school founder
I think we can empower more people to be food ambassadors or storytellers of Taiwanese cuisines so this year we developed a teaching material called Cooking Stars Taiwan. We try to collaborate with all the home economics teachers in junior high school and high school. We try to teach the students how to cook Taiwanese cuisine and also in a fun and easy way. And, also, how to explain it and how to say it, about the stories behind it. It is a bilingual teaching material. We have the key vocabulary and even all the recipes are bilingual. We also have videos for them to follow.
Tsai hopes to empower more people to share Taiwanese food culture to the world and encourages everyone to be a food ambassador.
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2025-04-04